Facebook removes ISI-backed Congress party accounts, pages

These accounts, it added, were linked to individuals working for ISPR - the publicity division of Pakistan’s military establishment, or the Inter-Services Public Relations. 

The announcement, which comes days ahead of voting begins in the general election, marks a rare action from Facebook against a prominent political party in the country. The election, scheduled to begin on 11 April, will end on 19 May.

According to Facebook, individuals using fake accounts joined various groups to disseminate their content and increase engagement on the social media web site. Their posts included local news and criticism of political opponents such as Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Facebook said.

“While the people behind this activity attempted to conceal their identities, our review found that it was connected to individuals associated with an INC (Indian National Congress) IT Cell,” Nathaniel Gleicher, head of cybersecurity policy at Facebook, said in a statement.

Gleicher added that Facebook was removing accounts based on their behaviour, not the content they posted

Two of the samples shared by Facebook were of posts that criticized Modi’s initiatives and called for supporting the Congress party and its president, Rahul Gandhi.

The social media giant also said it was removing 103 pages, groups and accounts, also for inauthentic behaviour, as part of a network which originated in Pakistan and was linked to employees of the Inter-Service Public Relations department of the Pakistani military.

Separately, Facebook said it had also removed another 227 pages and 94 accounts in India for violating its policies against spam and misrepresentation.

Under pressure from government authorities across the world, Facebook Inc chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg has called for new global regulations governing the internet, and has recommended overarching rules on hateful and violent content, election integrity, privacy and data portability.

In a statement that was also published as an op-ed in the Washington Post, Zuckerberg said the company is seeking regulations that would set baselines for prohibited content and require companies to build systems for keeping harmful content to a minimum.

"We have a responsibility to keep people safe on our services," he said. "That means deciding what counts as terrorist propaganda, hate speech and more. We continually review our policies with experts, but at our scale we’ll always make mistakes and decisions that people disagree with."

Zuckerberg’s comments mark his most visible effort so far to shape the discourse around the way the company collects information, uses and disperses i5:31 PM 4/1/2019t around the world.

Facebook has earlier been accused of allowing personal data of tens of millions of users to be shared with political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.